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Origins of City-States

Origins of City-States

David Stasavage

Publisher:

Princeton University Press

DOI:10.23943/princeton/9780691140575.003.0005

This chapter examines the origins of European city-states. It has long been observed that within Europe, autonomous cities tended to emerge in a relatively narrow belt stretching from the Low Countries to northern Italy, and this empirical observation has generated a variety of explanations. Answering this question is critical to the conceptualization of the broad process of state formation in Europe. The chapter asks why city-states emerged in some European regions in the first place, whereas elsewhere territorial states became the dominant mode of state organization. It considers the principal existing explanation for the pattern of city-state development, the Rokkan/Tilly hypothesis, and compares it with the Carolingian partition hypothesis. Results of empirical tests show that city-states were able to emerge in Europe's central core because this was where central political control collapsed to the greatest extent after the partition of the Carolingian Empire.

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PRINTED FROM PRINCETON SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.princeton.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Princeton University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HSO for personal use (for details see http://www.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 18 February 2018